Notorious Hacker TinKode Arrested In Romania

Romanian police have arrested the hacker who gained notoriety for hacking into Pentagon and NASA computer systems.

Razvan Manole Cernaianu, a 20-year-old who goes by the Internet name TinKode, allegedly revealed security holes and published information about SQL injection vulnerabilities he discovered.

The Romanian Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT) said the hacker also offered a computer program to hack into websites on his blog, and published a video showing Internet attacks he had orchestrated against the U.S. government.

In November 2010, TinKode also allegedly hacked into the British Royal Navy’s official website and exposed the site’s passwords.

A report by the Associated Press said the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest claimed Cernaianu is an IT student who used “used sophisticated hacking tools to gain unauthorized access to government and commercial systems.”

Cernaianu allegedly was the hacker who tapped into a computer server at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center last April, and posted a screen grab of an FTP server containing files connected to confidential satellite data.

TinKode also hacked into websites of the European Space Agency and MySQL. He ended up exploiting an SQL injection flaw after hacking into MySQL.

Officers for the FBI and NASA helped play a role in the investigation that led to the arrest of Cernaianu.